Word: functionally
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...Beverly Hills Cop there is no romantic interest, no high-voltage partner, no hairpin twist of plot. This is a no-frills star vehicle, with Murphy as a Detroit police detective scouring Rodeo Drive for clues to the murder of a friend back home. The film's only function is to provide Murphy with the opportunity to work a dozen or so variations on his familiar and oddly endearing routine: top Whitey. All of white America is a classroom for Fast Eddie's crash course in street smarts and larcenous one-upmanship. And everyone loves it, in the movie...
These are awesome images, astonishing images. But in the superb film that David Lean has made from E.M. Forster's sublime novel A Passage to India, their function far transcends the purely pictorial. In Lean's cinema there is no such thing as an idle shot, something that survives to the final cut merely because it is striking in its beauty or novel in its impact. Particularly in the Lean films that people conveniently but mistakenly identify as "epics" or "spectacles"?movies like The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago?the largest weight...
...task force is to limit the financial scale of the organ transplant business. The committee recommends a "no new facilities" policy in which the state would use the institutions, the hospitals, to restrict the number of operations performed. "Creating a limited capacity," in which "access [is] a function of medical condition" not of ability to pay, is the solution. Such restrictions would also ensure that other state-funded programs are not strangled by high costs of transplants...
...Clark's case, surgery was complicated by the fact that the heart tissue was so damaged by years of treatment with steroids that it tore like tissue paper in DeVries' hands. To make matters worse, when the artificial heart was implanted, it failed to function properly, and a stand-by left ventricle had to be substituted. DeVries felt so frustrated, he later admitted, that "I would have picked up the artificial heart and thrown it on the floor, if the press had not been there...
...shake-out in frames is yet to come. The genuinely imaginative conceits are already outnumbered by gratuitous doodads that seem to have little function except to disguise inert painting. After the challenging stringencies of painting in the 1970s, artists and buyers are in the mood for a little fun. But a flood of gimmicky borders may send them fleeing back to the pleasures of the unembellished edge, and remind them that, after all, the main event is on the canvas...